This is a pivotal moment for Penn. For nearly a decade, the Penn Compact has propelled our University from excellence to eminence by advancing our core endeavors of teaching, research, and service. Our Making History campaign met with spectacular success, engaging alumni, friends—indeed, the entire Penn community—on an unprecedented level. Now, Penn is strongly positioned to achieve even more.

Where do we go from here?

Our answer to this question will determine how we harness our collective drive to shape the future. Make no mistake: this pivotal moment extends beyond Penn and higher education. It encompasses how we address enormous global challenges such as climate change and energy production, food and security, health and politics. It bears strongly on Penn’s role in technological innovation and the dissemination of knowledge. Now is the time for a renewal of the strategic vision that has guided Penn to eminence. This renewed vision is both elegantly practical and simple, yet also bold in its power to lead our University through the next decade and beyond as one of the world’s preeminent academic institutions.

Our vision is Penn Compact 2020.

Penn Compact 2020 renews Penn’s fundamental priorities with continued focus on increasing access to our University’s exceptional intellectual resources; integrating knowledge across academic disciplines with emphasis on innovative understanding and discovery; and engaging locally, nationally, and globally to bring the benefits of Penn’s research, teaching, and service to individuals and communities at home and around the world. This vision will guide us in strengthening three core values that make us uniquely Penn: inclusion, innovation, and impact.

Our commitment to inclusion means we will continue to meet the full financial need of undergraduates with all-grant, no-loan aid packages. We also are dedicated to expanding the Penn World Scholars program, and to continue strengthening graduate and professional student financial aid. We will increase diversity at all levels with high priority efforts that include the Action Plan for Faculty Diversity and Excellence. And we will continue advancing Open Learning at Penn with high-quality online education initiatives that promote the very best teaching and educational research on Penn’s campus.

We will continue to innovate by bringing the greatest minds together across academic fields. To do this, we will increase Penn Integrates Knowledge and other endowed professorships across our schools to recruit and retain the most eminent interdisciplinary faculty. We will build highly collaborative, inter-school research and teaching programs. And we will expand Penn’s culture and practice of innovation through a new Pennovation Center, where Penn discoveries will find rapid application to pressing social needs.

Penn’s impact is powered by our engagement; it will change the ways we live and think at home, across the nation, and around the world. We will continue implementing our Penn Connects 2.0 campus plan to create the most innovative, sustainable, and beautiful urban campus with vibrant living and learning spaces for the community. By Fall 2016, we will open a spectacular new College House on Hill Field, making this prime campus space simultaneously more useful, beautiful, and welcoming to Penn, and also providing the opportunity to thoroughly renovate its neighbor, Hill College House. We will enable Penn faculty and students to advance knowledge-based public policy through focused inter-school programs including the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative. And we will bring the world to Penn and Penn to the world through broad-ranging university-wide programs including the Perry World House and Penn Wharton China Center.

To realize the bold and far-reaching vision of Penn Compact 2020, we depend most of all on our Penn people. As president, I am honored and privileged to work with the greatest people in higher education: the most talented students, eminent faculty, and exceptional staff. You are vital to Penn’s present and to our future. As we move forward with Penn Compact 2020, I am confident that, together, we will continue to accomplish great things. Thank you and welcome to another exciting new year at Penn!